Straight Edge Life

In my ongoing quest for total mobility and geeky independence I’ve come to know and love SSHTunnelManager. When you are on the road, this little application helps you connect safely to your machines at home. If, like me, you run your own email servers this can be invaluable. Basically, what SSHTunnelManager does is take ports on your local machine and forward them over ssh to ports on your home machine. For example, you send email through your machine at home by telling Mail to send outgoing mail through port 8025, then you tell SSH to take all local traffic on port 8025, connect to your machine at home via SSH, and send your mail on that local machine through port 25 (the standard port for smtp servers). You can choose any available port for outgoing traffic in Mail, it doesn’t have to be 8025.

You can do all of this via the command line. SSHTunnelManager is nice because it stores as many tunnels as you want, and helps you dodge writing shell scripts or entering the tunnels in terminal by hand. Boring.

This application runs on Mac OS X and possibly others. I don’t know.